Reading for Children 



F 73 
.4 

.B65 
Copy 1 



HISTORY. 






^^Kc 



CAMBRIDGE: 
JOHN WILSON AND SON. 

1884. 



m S? 1886 



Copyright, 1884, by N. Moore. 



WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. 



William Blackstone was the first white 
man to settle upon the land now covered by 
the city of Boston. No city stood here when 
he came ; the whole place was a wild, uneven 
patch of hills and hollows. 

He was an Englishman, and had been a 
clergyman. He left England, so he said, 
because he " did not like the Lord-Bishops." 
The king and bishops of England wished to 
be obeyed in all church matters : a great num- 
ber of Englishmen found that they could not 
obey the king and bishops ; and many of them 
came, as Mr. Blackstone did, to America. 

We cannot find out just when Mr. Black- 
stone crossed the ocean : it may have been in 
1623. In 1625 or 1626 he had already arrived, 
with leave to claim fifty acres of land, and had 



4 

chosen for his own a part of this hilly penin- 
sula which the Indians called Shawmut. 

Boston children know the hill on which the 
State House stands. It is a simple, round- 
topped hill now ; but then it had three peaks, 
— one where the State House is, one near 
Pemberton Square, and one upon the west, 
along Mt. Vernon Street. 

Mr. Blackstone made the sunny slope of the 
western peak his dwelling-place. His house, 
and a spring from which he drew clear cold 
water, were, it is thought, somewhere within 
the space enclosed by Beacon Street, Spruce 
Street, Pinckney Street, and the water. A 
point not far from his cottage came to be 
called Blackstone's Point: we think it was 
the one which once jutted out into the river 
at the foot of Pinckney Street. 

Having built his house, Mr. Blackstone dug 
and planted a garden. He set out an apple 
orchard too, — the first ever started here. 

No wife, no child, no friend, shared his home. 
In all Shawmut there was no other house. 



5 

He lived alone, and seemed to wish to live 
so. He has been called a hermit, a solitary, 
a recluse. 

His nearest neighbor lived across the river 
north of Shawmut. A house stood on Noddle's 
Island, or East Boston; another on Thompson's 
Island, in the harbor. Two or three small set- 
tlements had been made upon the coast, and 
far away was the Plymouth Colony ; but most 
of the Massachusetts shore was a waste of 
woodlands and marshes, with no white men to 
be seen for miles and miles, and only here and 
there a village of the Indians. 

For three or four years Mr. Blackstone 
tended his orchard and garden, while litde 
happened around him, save the passing from 
spring and summer to autumn and winter, and 
from winter back to spring again. He had 
brought some books with him from England, 
— one hundred and eighty-six volumes, — and 
these were his chief delight. He was so 
fond of reading that he was called not only a 
recluse, but a " bookish man." Through the 



long, silent winters his books must have 
seemed to him like real friends. 

At the end of the three or four years a few 
other white men from Salem, which had grown 
up meanwhile, found their way to the river's 
northern edge, and settled there, building sev- 
eral houses, — one of which was quite large, 
and was called the " Great House." Charles- 
town was the name given to this little settle- 
ment : Charles the First was King of England 
at that time, and the town and our river w^ere 
both named for him. 

About a year after the building of the Great 
House, a larger company of men came to 
Charlestown. Their leader was John Win- 
throp, who had been made governor of the 
whole Massachusetts colony, — Salem, Charles- 
town, Shawmut, and all. 

Mr. Blackstone soon learned that Governor 
Winthrop s company were in much distress. 
Many of them had fallen ill ; some had died. 
One cause of their trouble was that they had 
not been able to find good water in Charles- 



town. The only spring they knew of could 
not be reached except at low tide, and its 
water was brackish, unfit to drink. 

Living alone had not made Mr. Blackstone 
a bad neighbor. He knew that in Shawmut 
water was plenty, and that the settlers would 
thrive far better there than in Charlestown. 
He went to Governor Winthrop, told him of a 
certain " very excellent spring " in the eastern 
part of Shawmut, and urged him to leave 
Charlestown and settle in Shawmut instead. 

Governor Winthrop did leave Charlestown, 
and did settle in Shawmut. The once quiet 
place became alive with hurrying workers. 
Houses were built, streets were laid out, a 
town sprang up upon the shore. The town 
was named Boston. 

It was one of the rules of the colony that 
only members of the church could be allowed 
to vote or take part in public affairs. A man 
who did not belong to the church was not 
counted a " freeman " of the colony. 

Now, William Blackstone did not wish to 



8 

belong to the church. He did not like the 
church ways of the Boston men any better 
than he had liked the church ways of the Eng- 
lish bishops. 

Since he would not join the church, he was 
not a voting member of the town. He could 
have nothing to say about the spending of the 
town money, about laying out new streets, 
about building forts or wharves, or about 
any plan for making the town a better place 
to live in. He was like a stranger upon his 
own soil. He must have felt, then, a kind of 
loneliness which had never come to him while 
living apart from other men. He decided 
that he must go away. 

He sold to the town most of his land, — all 
of it except the six acres on which were his 
house, his garden, and his orchard. This six- 
acre lot he kept for some time longer, though 
he never lived upon it again. 

Part of the land bought from him was used 
by the townsfolk as a training-field, and as a 
common where all might pasture their cows : 



9 

that very land is our Common still, though it 
is hardly a pasture-ground now. 

With a portion of the money received for 
his land, Mr. Blackstone furnished himself with 
" a stock of cows," and, taking them with him, 
started upon a southward journey. 

To the men of the town he said: " I came 
from England because I did not like the Lord- 
Bishops ; but I cannot join with you, because I 
would not be under the Lord-Brethren ! " 



II. 



Mr. Blackstone's way lay through forests 
and across streams. No road ran broad and 
smooth before him. No bridges led him dry- 
shod over the water-courses. His path, at 
best, must have been an Indian trail, winding 
toward shallow fords, or where great rocks 
made stepping-stones from shore to shore. 

Did he have an Indian guide ? Did he go 



lO 

afoot? Did he take his books with him then, 
or send for them later ? How were they car- 
ried, — by Indians or by one of the few horses 
brought from England ? 

Among his books Mr. Blackstone had some 
papers which we think might have answered 
questions like these ; but the papers and books 
were all burned not long after Mr. Blackstone's 
death, and we shall never know what they may 
have had to tell of his life in England and in 
this country. 

The journey was brought to an end at about 
forty miles from Boston, beside a narrow river 
in a lovely fertile valley. 

On the eastern bank of the river Mr. Black- 
stone found a meadow which rose in three 
stretches, like three long, wide steps, each 
higher than the last. On the first of these he 
built a house ; on the second he dug a well. 
A new garden grew here under his care ; so 
did a new apple-orchard. The place came to 
be known as Rehoboth, and the river was 
named for him, — the Blackstone. That part 



II 

of Rehoboth is Lonsdale now, but the river 
still holds its old name. 

At Rehoboth Mr. Blackstone again led a her- 
mit s life. Here he was even farther away from 
other men than he had been at Shawmut. 

He found the new home much to his liking. 
At the west of his house, rising steeply from 
the meadow and close upon the river's brink, 
was a hillock sixty or seventy feet high. Mr. 
Blackstone used to read or study upon this 
knoll, and he named it Study Hill. He was 
still a "bookish" man. 

After about a year the town of Providence 
grew up, seven miles away from Rehobodi ; 
but the Providence people did not disturb 
Mr. Blackstone. Indeed, he must have en- 
joyed having them near, as he sometimes 
preached in Providence for Roger Williams, 
the founder of the town. He seems to have 
been fond of the children and young people 
of Providence: he used to carry apples to 
them from Rehoboth ; and many of the chil- 
dren, born in America, had perhaps never 



12 

tasted apples before. His orchard was a 
famous one. An old account, speaking of his 
apples, says : " He had the first of the sort 
. . . called yellow sweetings that were ever 
in the world." 

More than once, while living at Rehoboth, 
Mr. Blackstone visited his old home in Boston. 
Boston grew rapidly from year to year. The 
six-acre lot was sold, and several houses were 
built upon it. In one of these houses lived a 
Mistress Anne Pollard. She has said that Mr. 
Blackstone sometimes stopped at her house. 

After living twenty-four years at Rehoboth, 
Mr. Blackstone married a Boston woman, a 
Mrs. Martha Stevenson, and took her back to 
Rehoboth with him. Their wedding-day fell 
upon a Fourth of July, and Mr. Blackstone 
made holiday every time the day came round. 
He could not guess that by-and-by a whole 
new nation would be greeting the Fourth of 
July as its Independence Day. 

As Mr. Blackstone grew older, he found 
the walk from Rehoboth to Providence rather 



13 

long. He had no horse: what should he do? 
Among his cattle was a young bull ; this he 
trained to obey him. When it had become 
strong enough, he taught it to carry him upon 
its back. Here was a steed ! After that, on 
Sunday mornings, Mr. Blackstone walked to 
Providence no more. With his sermons or 
his apples, or with both, he mounted his bull, 
and was taken safely, if not swiftly, to town. 
It would be an odd sight now, but it was not 
so uncommon in those days. 

A son was born in Rehoboth, and Mr. Black- 
stone spent the rest of his life there. About 
a month after his death a war, called King 
Philip's War, broke out between the white 
men and some of the Indians ; and a party of 
Indians, coming to Rehoboth, set fire to Mr. 
Blackstone's house and burned or carried off 
everything in it. If only the books and pa- 
pers might have been saved ! 

The stones of the well were to be seen for 
some years after; and fifty years ago some 
feeble old apple-trees were still there, and still 



bearing fruit. They were thought to have 
grown from shoots of Mr. Blackstone's trees. 

The place is greatly changed now. Rail- 
road-tracks and telegraph wires pass through 
Study Hill ; and if we should go to the spot 
to-day, we should see, near where Mr. Black- 
stone's house once stood, the Lonsdale railway 
station. 



LIBRPRY OF CONGRESS 




014 077 983 



